DMCA hammer comes down on tech service

Found on LawGeek on Sunday, 11 July 2004
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A district court in Boston has used the DMCA to grant a preliminary injunction against a third party service vendor who tried to fix StorageTek tape library backup systems for legitimate purchasers of the system.

The court found that third party service techs who used the key without StorageTek's permission "circumvented" to gain access to the copyrighted code in violation of the DMCA, even though they had the explicit permission of the purchasers to fix their machines.

If it stands up on appeal, it means StorageTek has a monopoly on service for all of its machines. No independent vendor will be able to compete with them for service contracts because no independent vendor will be authorized to "access" the maintenance code necessary to debug the machine.

The Court also found, in a bizarre twist of logic, that while it is legal to load a program into RAM for repairs, it's illegal to allow it to persist in RAM while you fix it.

If a vendor has a monolopy on the service, it can easily raise prices to high levels due to the lack of competitors. Well, it's not really a lack of competitors. The vendor can simply slap others with a court rule. And I'm still trying to figure out the last line...